WASHINGTON, D.C. — Newt Gingrich played a key role in enacting the revolution in agricultural policy known as Freedom to Farm, which was supposed to wean growers from government support, but instead led to a massive increase in farm subsidies.

Gingrich didn’t come up with the policy itself, but he threw his support behind the legislation and intervened to ensure its passage over the opposition of Republicans and farm groups who were skeptical the new programs would work, say several people who were key figures in the policy debates that took place in 1995 and 1996.

Gingrich, who portrays himself as an intellectual, visionary leader, has jumped to the lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, according to recent polls.

In Iowa, he has sought to appeal to the farm vote with his strong support for federal biofuels policy, a critical issue for the state’s corn growers.

Congress is now moving to reverse course on the 1996 farm policy because of the unpopularity of the subsidies with both the public and many farm groups.

Gingrich had major role in passing bill

The Freedom to Farm policy “grew out of the belief that we were going to get the government out of agriculture,” said Dan Glickman, who was President Bill Clinton’s agriculture secretary at the time. “It turned out we didn’t get the government out of agriculture at all.”

Gingrich’s campaign staff did not respond to requests for comment.

The policy’s chief author, Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who was then chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said Gingrich played a major role in passing the bill.

“We had problem after problem after problem” winning passage, “and each and every time he was helpful,” he said.

Gingrich’s aid included first intervening with Republican conservatives to soften the cuts that would have to be made in farm spending and then to force the bill through the House when Roberts couldn’t get sufficient support in his committee.

“On every issue that I went to him with I was successful,” Roberts said. Gingrich “would call in all of the participants and say, ‘I side with Congressman Roberts.’ I really appreciated that.”

Key to bill: Fixed, annual payments

The Freedom to Farm bill upended a Depression-era system of subsidies that provided payments to farmers only when commodity prices dropped and sought to manage grain supplies through limits on how much farmers could grow.

The key feature of the new bill: fixed, annual payments that would go to every farmer and landowner with a history of growing subsidized crops such as corn and wheat. The payments were intended to be temporary and serve as a bridge to get farmers where they could survive without direct subsidies.

A farm bill drafted this fall by leaders of the congressional agricultural committees would scrap the direct payments and shift the money back into new forms of subsidies that would be tied once again to swings in commodity prices.

Critics of the 1996 bill dubbed it “Freedom to Fail,” warning that the fixed payments would be insufficient if market prices collapsed.

It didn’t make sense to give farmers the same amount of money each year no matter how high or low their income might be, the critics said. Sure enough, U.S. exports fell, grain prices plunged, and Congress responded with a flood of supplemental payments meant to shore up farm income.

Policy was based on strong grain exports

Government payments to farmers shot from $8.8 billion in 1996, the year Freedom to Farm was enacted, to as high as $26.2 billion by 2000 in inflation-adjusted data compiled by the Agriculture Department.

A University of Tennessee study last year found that the payments since 1996 would have been about half as much as they turned out to be if Congress had stuck to a policy more like what had been in place at the time. The Freedom to Farm policy was based on an erroneous assumption that strong grain exports would keep commodity prices high for years to come, said Darryl Ray, a co-author of the study.

“We essentially eliminated the mechanisms that we had used for years to at least keep prices from falling to extremely low levels,” Ray said.

The Freedom to Farm approach had been promoted years earlier by a Minnesota Republican senator, Rudy Boschwitz, but had failed to catch on with the agriculture committees. It found new appeal when Republicans took over the House in 1994 running on their Contract for America pledge to shrink the federal government.

Gingrich and other House leaders embraced the policy without “any great analysis of its advantages or disadvantages, for there was no such analysis,” economists Lyle Schertz and Otto Doering wrote in a book about the 1996 farm bill.

Gingrich supported budget reductions

Gingrich’s intervention was considered key when the House Budget Committee was pushing for deeper cuts in farm spending than Roberts and other farm-state Republicans wanted. Gingrich sided with them.

Gingrich was initially “pretty supportive of the notion of steep budget reductions that would have included steep reductions in agriculture,” but after being lobbied by farm-state Republicans, he realized farm policy “was more complex and complicated than he thought,” said Bill O’Conner, who was the Agriculture Committee’s policy director at the time.

Republican critics of bill were muffled

Later, when several Republicans on the Agriculture Committee refused to support the Freedom to Farm bill, blocking it from getting out of the panel, Gingrich and other House leaders stuffed the legislation into a broader budget bill. Gingrich muffled farm-state Republican critics of the bill by making an appeal to party discipline, Schertz and Doering wrote.

Eventually, even some Democrats came around to supporting the bill, even as they expressed misgivings.

With crop prices soaring at the time it was difficult for opponents to argue that farmers were imperiled by the policy shift, and eventually some Democrats would support it after expressing misgivings.

By the time the bill reached Clinton’s desk it was the spring of an election year, and Glickman says the president had little choice but to sign the measure into law.

“I told the president that if he didn’t sign the bill there would be a huge amount of uncertainty out there as we went into the presidential campaign and I didn’t think that was very smart,” Glickman said.

The fixed payments turned out to have a significant virtue: Because they weren’t tied to fluctuations in crop prices, they had relatively little impact on farmers’ planting decisions and therefore protected a large share of U.S. farm spending from running afoul of international trade rules.

Lobbyist says it’s time for a change

But political support for the payments has waned in recent years as crop prices have risen sharply due to federal biofuel mandates and strong global demand for commodities. Farm groups are now clamoring to shift the money into subsidies that would protect producers’ revenue in the case of future drops in commodity prices.

Charles Stenholm, a lobbyist and former Texas congressman who was a top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee when the 1996 farm bill was written, first opposed the policy shift, but would later play a lead role in crafting the 2002 farm bill that continued the fixed payments. He says it’s time for change again, he said.

“It’s been very difficult on the fiscal side to justify direct payments to cotton growers or corn growers when the prices are as good as they are,” he said.